Glenn Harper

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Phil Sager: Today is Wednesday, September 8, 2010. My name is Phil Sager. And I will be interviewing Glenn Harper. He served in the Ohio National Guard 1965 to 1971. Correct?
H: Yeah.
S: This interview is being conducted at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio as part of the oral history project by the Ohio Historical Society to preserve the stories and experiences of service members and their family members for future generations. So, just for the record, could you say and spell your full name?
H: Yes, my name is Glenn A. Harper. G-L-E-N-N A H-A-R-P-E-R.
S: Just to start out, can you tell us a little about your background—where you grew up, your family, and so forth.
H: I was born in Akron, Ohio. I lived there until 1978, then I moved to Southern Ohio. My parents lived there. I still have a brother and sister that live in Akron. So I spent the formative years of my life there. I’d still like to go back. I still like Akron.
S: Pretty much in Ohio your entire life?
H: I’m a buckeye, yep. Lived here all my life.
S: Um so…Did you have something to add?
H: My father worked. He was a laborer. He worked for Quaker Oats for twenty years until they closed, and then he worked for two different dairy companies until they closed. He was a hard working guy. Blue collar. My mother worked part time whenever she could after all of us grew up a little bit. Pretty typical of parents in that generation. Grew up during the Depression.
S: What were your impressions of the military, or maybe more specifically the National Guard, before you joined up?
H: I'm not sure I had many. Maybe I should explain why I joined the National Guard.
S: Sure.
H: I joined the National Guard for one reason: to stay out of Vietnam. I didn’t have any real strong feelings about the military one way or the other. I wasn’t politically active at that point in my life although by the early 1960s, some friends and I got into a Volkswagen and drove to Washington to a gigantic anti-war demonstration. By that time, things were really heating up. I was attending Akron University, and I was also working nights at a hospital. It wasn’t working out, and I was doing very poorly in school, so I dropped out of school, and I was immediately reclassified—1A—‘cause at that time, everybody had to carry a card. You either had dispensation because you were attending school, or you were going to be shipped away at some point. And I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, like anyone else. So a friend of mine told me about the National Guard, so I went and signed up. So that’s how I ended up in there.
S: So that would have been what time?
H: That would have been in 1965. Just about the first big buildup of Vietnam. I mean Johnson was calling up the Reserves and beginning to call up the Guard. And even at that time, the Guard was much different than it is now. It was really very domestic oriented. I mean there had never really been any thought to using the Guard in any kind of military fashion overseas, so this was really something brand new.
S: Just out of curiosity, any other people in your family in any branches of the military?
H: My father was in the army. I think for a couple of years right at the end of World War II, but he never went overseas or anything. I think he was stationed in Arkansas or some place like that.
S: When you decided to join, did they have any particular reaction to that?
H: No, I think they were probably happy—like me, they were happy I wasn’t going to be sent to Vietnam.
S: Even your dad?
H: Yeah, I don’t recall any statements from him or my mother about it one way or the other. It was just something I needed to do. I'm sure they were concerned about my lack of success academically, so in their minds, this was probably a feasible alternative ‘til I get my act together. As far as they were concerned, it didn’t matter a whole lot one way or the other.
S: We run into all these interesting terms while we do this project, one being MOS. So what was yours?
H: Military Occupation Specialty. You know I had forgotten it. I went back to look, and I was assigned to an Infantry platoon in a Headquarters company. And my specific military occupation was Infantry Indirect Fire Crewman, 11C40. Now, where that went, I'm not sure because when I got sent to Active Duty as soon as I finished up basic training, they decided that a bunch of us ought to be medics. So they sent us back to Fort Knox, and we were assigned to the big hospital—Ireland Hospital, I think it is. We were originally supposed to go to Fort Sam Houston, which is where all the people who are medics train till you get your advanced training in the specialty. But just about the time we were supposed to be sent to Fort Sam Houston, they cleaned out the hospital at Fort Knox and sent all those people to Vietnam because it was a mash I think—that sort of a thing. So that left the hospital half empty and with nobody to take care of patients. So suddenly overnight, our trip to Fort Sam Houston was canceled. We were put in on-the-job training; I guess you could call it. Some of us worked in hospitals; some of us worked in dispensaries, where basic training guys come in when they’re sick. I was in a dispensary, and I handed out cold medications, and I gave shots for venereal disease. I didn’t get any special training for any of this. It was, this is how you do it, go do it. So that’s what I did for the next ten weeks till I was discharged from active duty.
S: Who was actually showing you this stuff?
H: In my case, it was a Sergeant who worked in the dispensaries. He was in charge of it, so he was our boss. To me, looking back on it, it was a pretty bizarre way to do things, but also, I think probably pretty typically military. Whatever you need to do, you do.
S: So that fireman thing was very temporary? You went right to the medic thing?
H: I went right into the medic thing, but then when we came back to National Guard duty, my old MOS—they reapplied that, and because we hadn’t had any specific medical training, they then deemed that we weren’t trained to be medics, which I guess makes sense to me to some extent. But because we were in Headquarters Company, they gave me an M1 rifle, and we would go up on Lake Erie. We were supposed to learn how to shoot it, but there was this approach called marksmanship by pencil, and you just cheated and you filled out your scorecards. I hated guns, first of all. I almost flunked that part of basic training ‘cause I couldn’t stand to fire a weapon. Of course, in basic training, the worst possible thing that could happen to you was to be what they call “recycled.” If you flunk out of any part of your training, they just send you back to the beginning, and you start over for the whole thing. So of course, that was the worst possible nightmare was to have to start basic training again. Somehow I figured out a way to get enough of a score to not flunk rifle shooting. Once we got into the Guard itself in active two week summer camp training, any formality or importance attached to it kind of went out the window, which I think by the way is probably – the difference between the National Guard then and the National Guard now is the difference between day and night, I'm sure. You join the National Guard now; you may get sent to Afghanistan and get killed. There was no possibility of that happening when I joined the National Guard. So, I look back on that and say, “Wow, would I join the National Guard today?” I'm not so sure.
S: So, just to clarify what unit you were a member of and about how many people were in it and so forth?
H: Well, it was Headquarters Company, an Infantry platoon. There was probably—I don’t know how many are in a company—sixty, seventy. We’d meet once a month on a Saturday and Sunday at an armory in Akron, which is where I was living at the time. And two weeks in summer camp every summer, usually in July. And you rode in the back of a big army truck all night till you got to Grayling, Michigan, which is where you trained.
S: I think you kind of talked about basic training a little bit, so is there anything else that you wanted to say about that? Is that the first thing that happens with starting the Guard?
H: Yeah. Even though I signed up in May, I didn’t go to training until August. So what they do, I'm sure, is they schedule you in for whatever new training is starting at a particular time. So I was just on my own, doing whatever I wanted to do until August, at which point I got on a bus and rode to Fort Knox.
S: Any particular memories or experiences of that, or is it just trying to muddle through?
H: I think that I was like a lot of people in my unit—and I don’t mean this derogatorily or anything—but because of what was happening politically with the war and everything, there were a lot of people like me, who were in college or out of college. So I think we were slightly better educated than the average military person that goes into basic training. And again, I don’t mean that, “They’re inferior, and I’m—” That’s just the way it was. And you could tell that by the makeup of the company that I was assigned to. Almost all of them were college educated or were in the midst of getting a degree. And I don’t think that’s true as much nowadays. So did that make a difference? I don’t think it really did. You still got the same training. Some of us were probably in better physical shape than others. It’s a rough ten or twelve weeks. You definitely get in shape. They get you up at four o’ clock in the morning and run you around the block a few times. You take a hike with a full pack. You do all those kind of things, eat lousy food, you don’t get much sleep. You have this last event where it’s like simulated battle, where you’re crawling under the ground under barbed wire and bullets are flying by and that kind of experience. But, in a way, I'm kind of glad I did it. It was kind of a growing up experience.
S: This is my own curiosity question. One of the things that we’ve learned; it’s not on the sheet I gave you. It seems like in the course of the project—it seems like the Guard has to do everything. Maybe not so much when you were in the Guard, but you could be called up for war, you could be called up for some kind of dispute or riot, could be a natural disaster. How do you prepare—or do you prepare—training for all these different scenarios, or do you just take one certain skill set and just try and use it generally in different circumstances? If you understand what I mean.
H: Yeah. You’re right. Although, at that time, the militaristic use of the Guard was frowned upon. If you look at the history of the National Guard, it was a home Guard. We were the people who were supposed to be taking care of domestic situations and issues. Historically, that’s the way the Guard was used. It’s not until Iraq that you really saw the whole change in the use of the Guard. And today, there’s very little difference between the Guard and the army reserves, except the Guard can still be used for domestic disturbances, natural disasters. So in a way, their role is doubled. But during the time that I served, the six years that I served, I was called up for racial unrest in Akron, for a trucker strike in Akron where we camped out at the Rubber Bowl, and that’s the point at which Kent State occurred, and that’s why we were sent to Kent State, because we were already on active duty. I swear to this day it’s because it was so easy to send us to Kent that’s the reason we got sent to Kent. That and the fact that Governor Rhodes believed that that’s the way the Guard should be used.
S: Actually, I just want to get into some of those things that you talked about, but before I do that, I just wanted to ask you about, did you use the tuition assistance or benefits to—?
H: (Shakes head) No, because it really wasn’t available.
S: Oh, it wasn’t available?
H: No, GI Bill is not available to reserve units. That’s why they limit your active duty to the six months basically. Because if they go on beyond that, then they have to offer all kinds of benefits.
S: So it sounds like you were going to school or had gone to school.
H: I was going to school, but I was paying for it myself. I didn’t receive any GI Bill benefits for my education.
S: Where was that at?
H: Akron University.
S: Were you pursuing anything particular?
H: Yeah, I was pursuing a degree in history, and I was doing very badly because I didn’t really belong in school at that point in my life. I was pretty immature. After I graduated from high school, I got on a plane and went to California to go to a Junior College because at that time—believe it or not—if you were a resident of California, you could go to college for free. Imagine that today. The bankrupt state. But I was so homesick, I came home. I stayed out there less than a month, and I was living with relatives; it wasn’t like I was on my own or anything. So then I started going to Akron U, but again, I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I thought I was interested in history so I should get a degree in history. For every C I got, I got a D or an F, and I was on probation two or three times. So I finally just dropped out and went to work for a welfare department because I had enough education—higher education. I had like a year and a half or two years that I could qualify to work in a social service agency.
S: Well I actually want to ask you more about other things, but before we get into that, I want to get into something you mentioned as far as the specific events. You mentioned the things like the racial disturbances, domestic disputes, and trucker strike, and Kent State. I assume maybe we can just take each one and get your memories. Start with the domestic disputes; I'm kind of curious as to what this—
H: Well that was the early ‘60s, and if you read the recent past, this was happening all over the country—Detroit, Newark, on a much bigger scale: Los Angeles that’s little bit later. Even here in Columbus, I think they had some unrest and racial disturbances. Most of the major cities in the country were experiencing something like this at one point or another during that period. Akron, of course, is smaller scale. I don’t know what started it. All I remember is we got the call, went to the armory in downtown Akron, and for the next two or three days, we rode around on fire trucks, supposedly protecting the firemen, during the time which they were putting out these little fires that people set with Molotov cocktails and things, throwing against old buildings. There weren’t any conflagrations or anything like that, but it was just kind of a weird time. And I thought, you know here I am with my M1 rifle standing on the side of a fire truck, the fireman must have thought, “Who’s protecting who here?” It’s like, what a joke. If somebody would have taken a potshot at them or us, I don’t know what we would have done. Would we have fired back? I don’t know. It was strange. I think in a case like that, you ask, do you receive training specific to those kinds of responsibilities? No, I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you can. And a lot of this, I think, was probably the first time that the Guard had ever been used in this fashion for this kind of experience. It’s one thing to save people in rowboats from floods or earthquakes or things like that—natural disasters; it’s another thing to deal with some type of domestic disturbance like this. And I'm not sure that any of us were prepared for that. Thank god nothing serious happened, and nobody was killed—I don’t think; I don’t recall there was anyway. Whereas in other cities—Detroit and places like that—there were lots of lives lost, tremendous damage of property. It was a much smaller scale in Akron.
S: Right, so is this just the activities of a larger—I know Akron is a smaller city, but—
H: Cleveland had similar in Hough. They had Hough riots; they were major disturbances in Cleveland—almost the same time or within a few months, I think.
S: Did you see a lot of stuff going on while you were going around on your fire truck?
H: Just kids misbehaving and should have been in school and screwing around, doing things they shouldn’t be doing. But nothing major. Things weren’t totally out of control or anything like that.
S: So it never got to the level of some of those other cities?
H: No, no. I think, you know, smaller city, smaller scale. I tend to think some of this stuff is copycat. Oh, they’re doing it in Cleveland, we ought to try it in Akron, even though it’s a whole different scale in terms of the seriousness of it, but what motivated them may have been very similar. I never talked to any black people in Akron at that time.
S: After you went back, had anything happened to your knowledge?
H: There were a few buildings destroyed or partially burned, but other than that, it wasn’t block long fires or anything like that like it was in some of the major cities. Again, as I recall, it was pretty small potato. I think it was indicative of a lot of emotions and feelings and unrest at that time—racial unrest in the country at that time. It popped up here, and it popped up there, but it wasn’t all the same everywhere.
S: By the way, which side or were both parts of your responsibilities sort of been played at that point, medic versus Infantry?
H: Infantry. Medic went out the window.
S: Oh, I see. I see.
H: Yeah, I kind of wish it hadn’t because I always felt cheated, and I think other people in my situation felt cheated too. We could have used that training, and we didn’t get it because it was some short sidedness on the part of the military. They needed people here; it didn’t matter what we needed or wanted. We were available. We were warm bodies—stick them in the hospital or put them in the dispensaries.
S: So really, that role or job didn’t really exist in your—?
H: It existed, but I think there probably was a real medic in our platoon. I think there always is somebody assigned. I don’t remember who it was, and it certainly didn’t apply to us. I mean, we weren’t them. Just, we did our Infantry thing and cleaned your rifle.
S: Anything else about that episode before we move on?
H: Not really. It was the first time we had been activated. It might have been a wakeup call to some extent because I think we all thought, once you get back from active duty, everything is hunky dory; you don’t have to ever worry about being called out. We realized it. There was realities that we hadn’t been aware of.
S: That was the first one, then we just go chronologically. What would have been the next time you’ve been called out?
H: During that period, there was a huge flood—ten inches of rain in Akron and the whole watershed in that region.
S: When was this?
H: That would have been 1964 or ’65; it might have been a little bit later. There were a lot of Guard called up for that, but we weren’t part of it because most of the flooding was south around Wooster and places like that. But that was a great natural disaster, and that was a legitimate use of the National Guard, whereas I tend to think the things for which we were activated were not legitimate uses of the National Guard. I don’t think riding around fire trucks was a legitimate use of us. That’s why you have state patrol and local police departments, but for some reason they apparently felt that they didn’t have the manpower to—or I don’t know. I don’t know who was calling the shots. The second call up was¬¬—there was a trucker strike. Some truckers were on strike because—and I don’t know what all the detail was—they felt like they weren’t being paid. Others, members of the Union—some were not members of the Union, and so some of the truckers who were opposed to other truckers started shooting at their trucks from interstate highway bridges. And I don’t know how widespread this was or how many actual shots were fired. All I know is that we got called up, and our job was to stand on the bridges to keep people from shooting at trucks as they went by. Another, in my mind, pretty stupid use of our time. I think there was an attitude at the state government level: Let’s use the Guard in all these different kinds of ways. Whereas prior to that under different administration, a whole entire different decision could have been made. Again, that’s why we have the state patrol. I think that’s why we have them anyway. Or local police departments or sheriff departments. Anyways, that’s what we were doing a couple nights before May the fourth. Probably the week preceding May because we had been camped out in the Rubber Bowl for a couple nights, and I can’t remember how many nights that was.
S: Did you witness anything, or was there anything that happened?
H: No, I think I might have only been out here once. One of the things about using the Guard like this—I think what happens is you call up this big number of people but you don’t really need them all. So what you end up usually doing is sitting around on your ass all day, bored stiff. So a small percentage of that people that were actually called up are out there carrying out the mission, so my recollection—I admit it is pretty foggy anymore—but most of our time was spent in the Rubber Bowl. And not even out on the football field, but down in the catacombs underneath it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Rubber Bowl.
S: No, I’m not—
H: It’s a WPA football stadium. It’s a concrete bowl, and up until very recently, it was Akron University’s football stadium till they built a new stadium. And it’s still sitting there; it’s out south of town around the Goodyear ___ Bowl structure, not too far from there. And Soap Box Derby is right next door. Are you familiar?
S: Yeah, actually.
H: Derby Downs is what they call that. It’s right next door to the Rubber Bowl. All the high school football teams played their football games there. The Akron teams all played there from the 1930s all the way up. They may still play there as far as I know. But all the time I was in high school and junior high, played Friday night football. Friday night lights at the Rubber Bowl.
S: So everybody wasn’t—I mean, even apart from your involvement—were there instances on the bridges where things had happened or that you recollect clearly?
H: I don’t really remember. I think it was probably blown out of proportion, and the number of actually events is relatively small. First of all, the fact that they could suddenly whisk us away to Kent, to me says, they really didn’t need us here; let’s put them over there. So I think it had probably begun to wind down, and there must have been some settlement over this issue. So one side didn’t think they needed to fire at the other side anymore. And I don’t know that there were even any injuries. I think a couple windshields broken and things like that. It was obviously something that needed to be dealt with. I just don’t think it should have been the National Guard to deal with it. That’s my opinion.
S: So like you say, you got whisked off. It would have been—
H: Friday night, I think. First night of disturbances on and off the campus.
S: What day? What month?
H: That would have been May 2nd. ‘Cause May 4th was the shooting. They put us in some apartment building or dormitory or something. I don’t exactly remember. It seemed like it was off campus—I don’t exactly remember where it was now. And all I remember, it was dark by the time we got there, and it was the most bizarre experience because all night, there were helicopters flying over with their spotlights shining down. It was like you’re in some third world country or something, you know? I don’t think we got very much sleep. It might have been Saturday night, Sunday. I get the days mixed up, but what I do remember is that then, the next morning, they’d burned the Rossi building the night before. So then all the political people were going bananas. It was Rhodes’ decision to send us there in the first place. They put us in trucks, and we went to I think it was the men’s gymnasium, and we spent part of the night in the gymnasium—just kind of laying on the floor. This was only my company, and we were a Headquarters Company, so right off the bat, we would not have been on Blanket Hill or near the shootings because we were a Headquarters Company; we were supposed to be taking care of the headquarters. But I remember, suddenly that morning—the morning of the shootings—‘cause in the army, it’s always hurry up and wait. “Hurry up, get out here! Get out here!” And then you stand around for two or three hours. This was one of those times: “Hurry up, hurry up! Get outside, and circle around the gymnasium!” And that’s what we were doing—the people in my company. And we had live ammunition and blanks, both. This must have been a time at which things were really heating up on the hill because they told us to lock and load our ammunition. We were all standing in a circle next to each other. Suddenly I heard, “Pop, pop, pop. Pop, pop, pop,” which is what it sounds like from a distance. And I distinctly—just like it was yesterday—remember turning to my buddy next to me saying, “Oh, they're firing blanks.” Because no one that I knew ever, ever thought you would fire live ammunition in this situation. So that’s how I experienced Kent.
S: So you kind of heard it from a distance.
H: Heard it from a distance over the hill; didn’t see it. I heard it happening. But still very emotional, even though I didn’t really have anything to do with the shooting. The idea that I was there.
S: So you were around that gymnasium, just sort of guarding?
H: Yeah, we were protecting public property basically. And I think they probably felt, “Well they burnt down the ROTC building; the next thing they’ll do is burn down the men’s gymnasium.” After the shootings, they split us up and put us to guard different buildings. By that time, they kicked everybody else off campus. It’s an interesting experience for me because my wife was a student there at the same time I was in the Guard, so she can talk about it from her perspective, and I can talk about it from mine. We didn’t know each other of course; this was years before we even met. She talks about how they just basically said, “Get out! Leave everything. Take what few belongings you can get in a bag, and jump in a car and leave. Get off this campus as quickly as possible.” With no thought about when are we coming back? How are we going to deal with our education? Nothing was planned. She talks about her mother sitting on the steps of her house in Canton worried sick because, you know, she heard this all on the news but couldn’t communicate; there were no cell phones. There was no method of communicating back then like there is nowadays. But anyways, our task was supposed to be to guard the entrances to all these buildings – these campus buildings – and ask for identification before anyone could enter. And this man came up to me, and I said, “Who are you? Show me some identification.” It was the president of the university. “Oh, okay. Go right ahead.” Again, the whole thing was almost like dreamlike.
S: Well, that’s what I was kind of wondering. It’s like when you talked about being whisked in. There’s no way there could be a plan for this.
H: Nope.
S: You just were there.
H: I don’t think there was a plan, and I think that’s why the things that happen ultimately happen. The Guard wasn’t prepared for this kind of experience. You talk about being prepared. Well, how can you possibly be prepared for a situation like this? Even to this day, there’s controversy about how it happened, why it happened, who was responsible, who gave the command, was there a command, were the guard in fear of their lives? Despite all these books and everything else that have been written, a lot of it’s still an open question.
S: From your perspective having been one of the members, did you get any information from anybody—any of your fellow guardsmen or anybody there about what they had seen or known?
H: No, I never meant any of the people that were near the event and never met anybody that shot anyone or even fired their weapons. We were really separated physically and after the shootings, we lived in a dorm for a couple days, and we ate in the dorm cafeteria. That was another thing that was like, this is so bizarre. We’re not students, yet we’re using the student facilities, and the students are not here. So that’s what we did for the next couple days, and then finally, they sent us home. One thing I remember is politically, I must have had a pretty different political orientation from a lot of my peers because I recall that some of us weren’t on speaking terms for quite a while after that. And we only saw each other once a month, but there was a pretty conservative faction in the Guard, and then there were probably a few people like me who weren’t nearly as conservative, who to this day feel that it all could be laid at the feet of Governor Rhodes. He’s the one who made that decision, and again, that’s why we have the state patrol. That’s why we have police force. They're trained to deal with situations like this. We weren’t trained in any way, shape, or form to deal with this, and so this is the consequence, I think.
S: You mentioned your relationship between you and other guards’ members and some of your political differences. How about you and some of the people outside the Guard? Did they, first of all, know that you were in the Guard? And secondly—
H: Yeah, most of my friends kind of thought the way I did. I mean, we all thought that George McGovern was going to get elected president. That’s how politically isolated, I think, we were from reality. Because all the people I knew were going to vote for him that must mean that he’s going to win. I don’t know if I wasn’t reading the newspapers. There wasn’t any public radio or television. So I didn’t have any disagreements with my friends because we all kind of thought the same way, but in the Guard, yeah, there was a definite difference of opinion. A lot of students went home and just got earfuls from their parents about, “Damn students—they got what they deserved.” There was a lot of hate mail flying back and forth, but I didn’t personally experience any of that. I know about it because I read about it.
S: How did that change your perspective on things? You told us how and why you got in; this seems like something that would change your perspective.
H: Yeah, well of course, I couldn’t wait to get out. And that was only a year before I got out, so I was on the tail end of my active duty. I think it just solidified some of my political beliefs—my anti-war beliefs, even though I was not politically active, other than attending a few demonstrations and things like that, but not nearly as much as a lot of people were. It certainly—if my beliefs weren’t pretty solidified by that time that sort of helped them be. To this day, I'm pretty liberal. I don’t mind calling myself liberal; I don’t need to be a progressive or—by the way, I celebrated the exit from the Guard by having a gigantic party at which I auctioned off all my uniforms to the highest bidder. That was kind of my feelings toward the Guard. A lot of it was a big waste of time. For example, we would go to a summer camp, and every morning you’d go out and set up your guns—strategic position somewhere out in the forest. And for the next eight hours, the task was to hide basically. Just stay out of the way. Don’t bother me. I think that idea or lack of the use of that time in a constructive fashion came from the top down. Otherwise, I don’t think that we would have gotten away with it that much. I think it was sort of like out of sight, out of mind: You stay over there, and stay out of my way, and I won’t bother you. And then when the day was over, you’d all go out and drink all night. And then come back the next day and do the same thing for two weeks. And weekends were basically the same way; we didn’t do anything constructive for those two days. You’d just go find some place to hunker down, and then they’d call everybody to attention, do a little inspection, and everybody would go home. That was the National Guard back then; it’s not the National Guard nowadays, of course. I think that was pretty widespread.
S: Before we move from Kent State, I just want to ask if there is anything else that stands out in your mind or a memory that’s particularly salient or anything that you haven’t mentioned.
H: As far as the Guard’s concerned, I don’t think so. I grew up during that time. Eventually went back to school, finished my undergraduate degree, got a graduate degree, came to work here.
S: Well, yeah, I guess, let me ask you about that. So your next step was, you finished your undergraduate degree, and where was that?
H: Antioch. I sort of had a midlife crisis, I guess in my early forties. It took me a long time to finish my education, so Antioch was the perfect place for me because I was able to transfer a lot of credit. I developed a really great relationship with a young professor, a peer, and eventually colleague, but did a lot of independent study with him. So at that point of my life, it was perfect academic setting for me. By that time, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so I was very successful. As soon as I finished my undergraduate, I knew I wanted to go to Ball State and get my degree in historic preservation.
S: So your major area of concentration at Antioch was—?
H: History. Finished what I started at Akron U, but I knew, of course, you don’t go anywhere without a graduate degree, so if I wanted a job, I had to get more specific. I had an interesting experience at Antioch. It had to do with the Guard. I was in a creative writing course, and I’m like forty-four or something like that, and everybody else in the room was like twenty-two or twenty-three. Well Antioch has always from day one thought of itself as the liberal bastion of political thought. I think they almost had an inferiority complex; they thought that, “Why didn’t Kent occur here?” Because this is ground zero when it comes to liberal political thinking and anti-war and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, we had to write an article or a paper—a first-person experience. So I wrote one on my first-person experience at Kent. You had to stand up and read this, and the students just—they were absolutely amazed. First of all, they met somebody who had been at Kent, even though I had nothing to do directly with the shootings or anything, but there’s a somebody that had actually been to this place and had this experience. All kinds of questions. I guess I maybe hadn’t realized the impact that it had on a lot of other people, even people much younger than myself. This would have been in ’85, so this was fifteen years after. These kids would have been three or four years old at that time, or five or six. I don’t know. An entirely new generation. Thinking about this—for them, they hadn’t experienced that history, but they knew about it.
S: Just to bring this up today, what was your trajectory from your grad studies to where you are now?
H: Yeah, as soon as I graduated, there was really basically a job here for me, waiting for me. I had done survey and inventory, Stark property inventory for the office as a graduate student, two summers before I graduated from Ball State. So I knew there was going to be a job opening. I worked at the Montgomery County Historical Society for six months after I graduated from Ball State in July until this job became available in April of 1988, so that’s when I started, and I quit four weeks ago.
S: And just to clarify, you were doing what specifically here?
H: I was in charge of the certified local government program, which is a program where we work with local communities to establish historic preservation programs and help them create local ordinances and architectural design review. The goal, of course, is to revitalize downtown, save neighborhoods, save old buildings. Now, I did a number of special projects over the years. Like I said, I worked on all kinds of things related to the National Road, obtained funding for the first inventory of the Road, worked to get the Road designated on state scenic byway and ultimately a national scenic byway, cofounded the National Road Alliance—which is a six state organization oversees protection of the road—founding member of the Ohio National Road Alliance, so the office gave me that flexibility and opportunity to do those things, so I'm really grateful that that was a possibility. Then I also, I was in charge of the state plan, so we had to do that every three or four years. A lot of other projects—I was a go-to barn guy; every time someone had a question about—I was sort of the jack of all trades for the office. It’s the only job of its kind. Everybody else has a much more specific responsibility related to National Historic Preservation Act. They do 106 reviews, or they do historic tax credit reviews. That’s usually where most of the work is done. My job is much broader than that—a lot of independent work. I had a job description, but if an opportunity came along, and it related to historic preservation, chances are, I could probably pursue that if I wanted to—as long as I took care of all these specific responsibilities that I had. And I really valued that. I think I was pretty lucky to be in that position, and I had a boss that gave me that kind of flexibility and didn’t feel the need to stand over me but, he knew that I could be trusted to get the work done.
S: And now you’re doing part-time?
H: Yeah, I've always taught part-time ever since I graduated from Ball State. When I first started here, we had a system of field offices. By that time, there were only five. At one time, there were seventeen field offices around the state back in housing on days at federal funding in the early ‘80s. So I went to work at Bowling Green ‘cause we had a field office there. That was where the job become open, and I worked there for four years, and then the person who was at Wright State retired, and so I jumped at the chance to come to Wright State because I was living in Dayton and commuting from Dayton to Bowling Green every Monday and every Friday for four years. So that got old. The opportunity to come to Wright State and be five minutes from home; It didn’t take me long to make that decision. But then the field offices all closed - budget crunch time about 1990, I think, ’91. Not ’91, I'm sorry—’98, ’99. So for the last ten years, I've worked here in the Columbus office. But I commuted back and forth from Springboro.
S: So the courses that you're teaching relates in some way—?
H: Yeah, I teach Architectural History and Historic Preservation alternating spring quarters, and then I teach a course called Documenting the Building Environment, which is just a one credit hour Saturday course every February. And I was scheduled to teach a brand new course this fall called Interpreting Historic Sites, which I’d created—designed—until I discovered that when you’re retired under two different retirement systems, as I did, and when you go back to work under the lesser system—which is my case would be STRS—you can’t work for two months. So I had to cancel my course. I can’t go back to work till October 1st, and the course started today as a matter of fact would have been my first class. So anyway, that’s where that’s at. So I continue to teach, and I’ll be doing some consulting work.
S: I just want to kind of close this out. Obviously you’re a student of history and preservation and so on. From your days when you were in National Guard— did you keep any diaries, journals, pictures, any of that sort of thing, or is it just sort of up here?
H: I wish I had like of people. No, I wasn’t a diary person. I look back on earlier in my life and wish I had made some notes and written things down. At this point of my life where the past seems to be more and more to me. Maybe that’s what happens when you get older. I don’t know. So I think more about it. But I didn’t—like a lot of people—didn’t think in those terms when all this was happening, or when earlier experiences were happening. I have a photograph of me with a hard hat with a military pot on my head in the National Guard. That’s the only thing—that and the group picture that they always took of your company. That’s the only visual evidence—that and my honorable discharge.
S: You said something about this—how your time in the Guard affected your personal or professional life. You said you sort of grew up, but is there anything you wanted to add about that?
H: Not really, it was just something you did. Like I said, I didn’t have any strong political beliefs. I think I just wanted to be left alone, you know, but I couldn’t be left alone. I had to do something, or something was going to be done to me. At some point in your life, you just try to take control of things. My way of taking control in this situation was to join the National Guard. It wasn’t because I liked the Guard or hated the Guard or I believed the Guard was important. It was just there. It was a convenience factor for me, and that’s all it was. And I kind of treated it that way for six years. It was like, you ignored as much as you can. You do what you have to do. That’s what everybody was doing I think at that point. So you pick that up right away. Don’t make waves; don’t bother me. Just stay out of the way. The idea that you can go supposedly learning how to fire your weapon but you could fill out a scorecard with a pencil, to me, is indicative of where the Guard was at that point. I'm sure it’s very, very different nowadays, but that’s the way things were back then.
S: Well just to sort of wrap things up, is there anything else that we’ve left out or you wanted to add or sticks out in your mind?
H: I don’t think so. It’s been worth recalling some of these things.
S: Thanks very much. I really appreciate you getting here.

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Phil Sager: Today is Wednesday, September 8, 2010. My name is Phil Sager. And I will be interviewing Glenn Harper. He served in the Ohio National Guard 1965 to 1971. Correct?
H: Yeah.
S: This interview is being conducted at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio as part of the oral history project by the Ohio Historical Society to preserve the stories and experiences of service members and their family members for future generations. So, just for the record, could you say and spell your full name?
H: Yes, my name is Glenn A. Harper. G-L-E-N-N A H-A-R-P-E-R.
S: Just to start out, can you tell us a little about your background—where you grew up, your family, and so forth.
H: I was born in Akron, Ohio. I lived there until 1978, then I moved to Southern Ohio. My parents lived there. I still have a brother and sister that live in Akron. So I spent the formative years of my life there. I’d still like to go back. I still like Akron.
S: Pretty much in Ohio your entire life?
H: I’m a buckeye, yep. Lived here all my life.
S: Um so…Did you have something to add?
H: My father worked. He was a laborer. He worked for Quaker Oats for twenty years until they closed, and then he worked for two different dairy companies until they closed. He was a hard working guy. Blue collar. My mother worked part time whenever she could after all of us grew up a little bit. Pretty typical of parents in that generation. Grew up during the Depression.
S: What were your impressions of the military, or maybe more specifically the National Guard, before you joined up?
H: I'm not sure I had many. Maybe I should explain why I joined the National Guard.
S: Sure.
H: I joined the National Guard for one reason: to stay out of Vietnam. I didn’t have any real strong feelings about the military one way or the other. I wasn’t politically active at that point in my life although by the early 1960s, some friends and I got into a Volkswagen and drove to Washington to a gigantic anti-war demonstration. By that time, things were really heating up. I was attending Akron University, and I was also working nights at a hospital. It wasn’t working out, and I was doing very poorly in school, so I dropped out of school, and I was immediately reclassified—1A—‘cause at that time, everybody had to carry a card. You either had dispensation because you were attending school, or you were going to be shipped away at some point. And I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, like anyone else. So a friend of mine told me about the National Guard, so I went and signed up. So that’s how I ended up in there.
S: So that would have been what time?
H: That would have been in 1965. Just about the first big buildup of Vietnam. I mean Johnson was calling up the Reserves and beginning to call up the Guard. And even at that time, the Guard was much different than it is now. It was really very domestic oriented. I mean there had never really been any thought to using the Guard in any kind of military fashion overseas, so this was really something brand new.
S: Just out of curiosity, any other people in your family in any branches of the military?
H: My father was in the army. I think for a couple of years right at the end of World War II, but he never went overseas or anything. I think he was stationed in Arkansas or some place like that.
S: When you decided to join, did they have any particular reaction to that?
H: No, I think they were probably happy—like me, they were happy I wasn’t going to be sent to Vietnam.
S: Even your dad?
H: Yeah, I don’t recall any statements from him or my mother about it one way or the other. It was just something I needed to do. I'm sure they were concerned about my lack of success academically, so in their minds, this was probably a feasible alternative ‘til I get my act together. As far as they were concerned, it didn’t matter a whole lot one way or the other.
S: We run into all these interesting terms while we do this project, one being MOS. So what was yours?
H: Military Occupation Specialty. You know I had forgotten it. I went back to look, and I was assigned to an Infantry platoon in a Headquarters company. And my specific military occupation was Infantry Indirect Fire Crewman, 11C40. Now, where that went, I'm not sure because when I got sent to Active Duty as soon as I finished up basic training, they decided that a bunch of us ought to be medics. So they sent us back to Fort Knox, and we were assigned to the big hospital—Ireland Hospital, I think it is. We were originally supposed to go to Fort Sam Houston, which is where all the people who are medics train till you get your advanced training in the specialty. But just about the time we were supposed to be sent to Fort Sam Houston, they cleaned out the hospital at Fort Knox and sent all those people to Vietnam because it was a mash I think—that sort of a thing. So that left the hospital half empty and with nobody to take care of patients. So suddenly overnight, our trip to Fort Sam Houston was canceled. We were put in on-the-job training; I guess you could call it. Some of us worked in hospitals; some of us worked in dispensaries, where basic training guys come in when they’re sick. I was in a dispensary, and I handed out cold medications, and I gave shots for venereal disease. I didn’t get any special training for any of this. It was, this is how you do it, go do it. So that’s what I did for the next ten weeks till I was discharged from active duty.
S: Who was actually showing you this stuff?
H: In my case, it was a Sergeant who worked in the dispensaries. He was in charge of it, so he was our boss. To me, looking back on it, it was a pretty bizarre way to do things, but also, I think probably pretty typically military. Whatever you need to do, you do.
S: So that fireman thing was very temporary? You went right to the medic thing?
H: I went right into the medic thing, but then when we came back to National Guard duty, my old MOS—they reapplied that, and because we hadn’t had any specific medical training, they then deemed that we weren’t trained to be medics, which I guess makes sense to me to some extent. But because we were in Headquarters Company, they gave me an M1 rifle, and we would go up on Lake Erie. We were supposed to learn how to shoot it, but there was this approach called marksmanship by pencil, and you just cheated and you filled out your scorecards. I hated guns, first of all. I almost flunked that part of basic training ‘cause I couldn’t stand to fire a weapon. Of course, in basic training, the worst possible thing that could happen to you was to be what they call “recycled.” If you flunk out of any part of your training, they just send you back to the beginning, and you start over for the whole thing. So of course, that was the worst possible nightmare was to have to start basic training again. Somehow I figured out a way to get enough of a score to not flunk rifle shooting. Once we got into the Guard itself in active two week summer camp training, any formality or importance attached to it kind of went out the window, which I think by the way is probably – the difference between the National Guard then and the National Guard now is the difference between day and night, I'm sure. You join the National Guard now; you may get sent to Afghanistan and get killed. There was no possibility of that happening when I joined the National Guard. So, I look back on that and say, “Wow, would I join the National Guard today?” I'm not so sure.
S: So, just to clarify what unit you were a member of and about how many people were in it and so forth?
H: Well, it was Headquarters Company, an Infantry platoon. There was probably—I don’t know how many are in a company—sixty, seventy. We’d meet once a month on a Saturday and Sunday at an armory in Akron, which is where I was living at the time. And two weeks in summer camp every summer, usually in July. And you rode in the back of a big army truck all night till you got to Grayling, Michigan, which is where you trained.
S: I think you kind of talked about basic training a little bit, so is there anything else that you wanted to say about that? Is that the first thing that happens with starting the Guard?
H: Yeah. Even though I signed up in May, I didn’t go to training until August. So what they do, I'm sure, is they schedule you in for whatever new training is starting at a particular time. So I was just on my own, doing whatever I wanted to do until August, at which point I got on a bus and rode to Fort Knox.
S: Any particular memories or experiences of that, or is it just trying to muddle through?
H: I think that I was like a lot of people in my unit—and I don’t mean this derogatorily or anything—but because of what was happening politically with the war and everything, there were a lot of people like me, who were in college or out of college. So I think we were slightly better educated than the average military person that goes into basic training. And again, I don’t mean that, “They’re inferior, and I’m—” That’s just the way it was. And you could tell that by the makeup of the company that I was assigned to. Almost all of them were college educated or were in the midst of getting a degree. And I don’t think that’s true as much nowadays. So did that make a difference? I don’t think it really did. You still got the same training. Some of us were probably in better physical shape than others. It’s a rough ten or twelve weeks. You definitely get in shape. They get you up at four o’ clock in the morning and run you around the block a few times. You take a hike with a full pack. You do all those kind of things, eat lousy food, you don’t get much sleep. You have this last event where it’s like simulated battle, where you’re crawling under the ground under barbed wire and bullets are flying by and that kind of experience. But, in a way, I'm kind of glad I did it. It was kind of a growing up experience.
S: This is my own curiosity question. One of the things that we’ve learned; it’s not on the sheet I gave you. It seems like in the course of the project—it seems like the Guard has to do everything. Maybe not so much when you were in the Guard, but you could be called up for war, you could be called up for some kind of dispute or riot, could be a natural disaster. How do you prepare—or do you prepare—training for all these different scenarios, or do you just take one certain skill set and just try and use it generally in different circumstances? If you understand what I mean.
H: Yeah. You’re right. Although, at that time, the militaristic use of the Guard was frowned upon. If you look at the history of the National Guard, it was a home Guard. We were the people who were supposed to be taking care of domestic situations and issues. Historically, that’s the way the Guard was used. It’s not until Iraq that you really saw the whole change in the use of the Guard. And today, there’s very little difference between the Guard and the army reserves, except the Guard can still be used for domestic disturbances, natural disasters. So in a way, their role is doubled. But during the time that I served, the six years that I served, I was called up for racial unrest in Akron, for a trucker strike in Akron where we camped out at the Rubber Bowl, and that’s the point at which Kent State occurred, and that’s why we were sent to Kent State, because we were already on active duty. I swear to this day it’s because it was so easy to send us to Kent that’s the reason we got sent to Kent. That and the fact that Governor Rhodes believed that that’s the way the Guard should be used.
S: Actually, I just want to get into some of those things that you talked about, but before I do that, I just wanted to ask you about, did you use the tuition assistance or benefits to—?
H: (Shakes head) No, because it really wasn’t available.
S: Oh, it wasn’t available?
H: No, GI Bill is not available to reserve units. That’s why they limit your active duty to the six months basically. Because if they go on beyond that, then they have to offer all kinds of benefits.
S: So it sounds like you were going to school or had gone to school.
H: I was going to school, but I was paying for it myself. I didn’t receive any GI Bill benefits for my education.
S: Where was that at?
H: Akron University.
S: Were you pursuing anything particular?
H: Yeah, I was pursuing a degree in history, and I was doing very badly because I didn’t really belong in school at that point in my life. I was pretty immature. After I graduated from high school, I got on a plane and went to California to go to a Junior College because at that time—believe it or not—if you were a resident of California, you could go to college for free. Imagine that today. The bankrupt state. But I was so homesick, I came home. I stayed out there less than a month, and I was living with relatives; it wasn’t like I was on my own or anything. So then I started going to Akron U, but again, I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I thought I was interested in history so I should get a degree in history. For every C I got, I got a D or an F, and I was on probation two or three times. So I finally just dropped out and went to work for a welfare department because I had enough education—higher education. I had like a year and a half or two years that I could qualify to work in a social service agency.
S: Well I actually want to ask you more about other things, but before we get into that, I want to get into something you mentioned as far as the specific events. You mentioned the things like the racial disturbances, domestic disputes, and trucker strike, and Kent State. I assume maybe we can just take each one and get your memories. Start with the domestic disputes; I'm kind of curious as to what this—
H: Well that was the early ‘60s, and if you read the recent past, this was happening all over the country—Detroit, Newark, on a much bigger scale: Los Angeles that’s little bit later. Even here in Columbus, I think they had some unrest and racial disturbances. Most of the major cities in the country were experiencing something like this at one point or another during that period. Akron, of course, is smaller scale. I don’t know what started it. All I remember is we got the call, went to the armory in downtown Akron, and for the next two or three days, we rode around on fire trucks, supposedly protecting the firemen, during the time which they were putting out these little fires that people set with Molotov cocktails and things, throwing against old buildings. There weren’t any conflagrations or anything like that, but it was just kind of a weird time. And I thought, you know here I am with my M1 rifle standing on the side of a fire truck, the fireman must have thought, “Who’s protecting who here?” It’s like, what a joke. If somebody would have taken a potshot at them or us, I don’t know what we would have done. Would we have fired back? I don’t know. It was strange. I think in a case like that, you ask, do you receive training specific to those kinds of responsibilities? No, I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you can. And a lot of this, I think, was probably the first time that the Guard had ever been used in this fashion for this kind of experience. It’s one thing to save people in rowboats from floods or earthquakes or things like that—natural disasters; it’s another thing to deal with some type of domestic disturbance like this. And I'm not sure that any of us were prepared for that. Thank god nothing serious happened, and nobody was killed—I don’t think; I don’t recall there was anyway. Whereas in other cities—Detroit and places like that—there were lots of lives lost, tremendous damage of property. It was a much smaller scale in Akron.
S: Right, so is this just the activities of a larger—I know Akron is a smaller city, but—
H: Cleveland had similar in Hough. They had Hough riots; they were major disturbances in Cleveland—almost the same time or within a few months, I think.
S: Did you see a lot of stuff going on while you were going around on your fire truck?
H: Just kids misbehaving and should have been in school and screwing around, doing things they shouldn’t be doing. But nothing major. Things weren’t totally out of control or anything like that.
S: So it never got to the level of some of those other cities?
H: No, no. I think, you know, smaller city, smaller scale. I tend to think some of this stuff is copycat. Oh, they’re doing it in Cleveland, we ought to try it in Akron, even though it’s a whole different scale in terms of the seriousness of it, but what motivated them may have been very similar. I never talked to any black people in Akron at that time.
S: After you went back, had anything happened to your knowledge?
H: There were a few buildings destroyed or partially burned, but other than that, it wasn’t block long fires or anything like that like it was in some of the major cities. Again, as I recall, it was pretty small potato. I think it was indicative of a lot of emotions and feelings and unrest at that time—racial unrest in the country at that time. It popped up here, and it popped up there, but it wasn’t all the same everywhere.
S: By the way, which side or were both parts of your responsibilities sort of been played at that point, medic versus Infantry?
H: Infantry. Medic went out the window.
S: Oh, I see. I see.
H: Yeah, I kind of wish it hadn’t because I always felt cheated, and I think other people in my situation felt cheated too. We could have used that training, and we didn’t get it because it was some short sidedness on the part of the military. They needed people here; it didn’t matter what we needed or wanted. We were available. We were warm bodies—stick them in the hospital or put them in the dispensaries.
S: So really, that role or job didn’t really exist in your—?
H: It existed, but I think there probably was a real medic in our platoon. I think there always is somebody assigned. I don’t remember who it was, and it certainly didn’t apply to us. I mean, we weren’t them. Just, we did our Infantry thing and cleaned your rifle.
S: Anything else about that episode before we move on?
H: Not really. It was the first time we had been activated. It might have been a wakeup call to some extent because I think we all thought, once you get back from active duty, everything is hunky dory; you don’t have to ever worry about being called out. We realized it. There was realities that we hadn’t been aware of.
S: That was the first one, then we just go chronologically. What would have been the next time you’ve been called out?
H: During that period, there was a huge flood—ten inches of rain in Akron and the whole watershed in that region.
S: When was this?
H: That would have been 1964 or ’65; it might have been a little bit later. There were a lot of Guard called up for that, but we weren’t part of it because most of the flooding was south around Wooster and places like that. But that was a great natural disaster, and that was a legitimate use of the National Guard, whereas I tend to think the things for which we were activated were not legitimate uses of the National Guard. I don’t think riding around fire trucks was a legitimate use of us. That’s why you have state patrol and local police departments, but for some reason they apparently felt that they didn’t have the manpower to—or I don’t know. I don’t know who was calling the shots. The second call up was¬¬—there was a trucker strike. Some truckers were on strike because—and I don’t know what all the detail was—they felt like they weren’t being paid. Others, members of the Union—some were not members of the Union, and so some of the truckers who were opposed to other truckers started shooting at their trucks from interstate highway bridges. And I don’t know how widespread this was or how many actual shots were fired. All I know is that we got called up, and our job was to stand on the bridges to keep people from shooting at trucks as they went by. Another, in my mind, pretty stupid use of our time. I think there was an attitude at the state government level: Let’s use the Guard in all these different kinds of ways. Whereas prior to that under different administration, a whole entire different decision could have been made. Again, that’s why we have the state patrol. I think that’s why we have them anyway. Or local police departments or sheriff departments. Anyways, that’s what we were doing a couple nights before May the fourth. Probably the week preceding May because we had been camped out in the Rubber Bowl for a couple nights, and I can’t remember how many nights that was.
S: Did you witness anything, or was there anything that happened?
H: No, I think I might have only been out here once. One of the things about using the Guard like this—I think what happens is you call up this big number of people but you don’t really need them all. So what you end up usually doing is sitting around on your ass all day, bored stiff. So a small percentage of that people that were actually called up are out there carrying out the mission, so my recollection—I admit it is pretty foggy anymore—but most of our time was spent in the Rubber Bowl. And not even out on the football field, but down in the catacombs underneath it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Rubber Bowl.
S: No, I’m not—
H: It’s a WPA football stadium. It’s a concrete bowl, and up until very recently, it was Akron University’s football stadium till they built a new stadium. And it’s still sitting there; it’s out south of town around the Goodyear ___ Bowl structure, not too far from there. And Soap Box Derby is right next door. Are you familiar?
S: Yeah, actually.
H: Derby Downs is what they call that. It’s right next door to the Rubber Bowl. All the high school football teams played their football games there. The Akron teams all played there from the 1930s all the way up. They may still play there as far as I know. But all the time I was in high school and junior high, played Friday night football. Friday night lights at the Rubber Bowl.
S: So everybody wasn’t—I mean, even apart from your involvement—were there instances on the bridges where things had happened or that you recollect clearly?
H: I don’t really remember. I think it was probably blown out of proportion, and the number of actually events is relatively small. First of all, the fact that they could suddenly whisk us away to Kent, to me says, they really didn’t need us here; let’s put them over there. So I think it had probably begun to wind down, and there must have been some settlement over this issue. So one side didn’t think they needed to fire at the other side anymore. And I don’t know that there were even any injuries. I think a couple windshields broken and things like that. It was obviously something that needed to be dealt with. I just don’t think it should have been the National Guard to deal with it. That’s my opinion.
S: So like you say, you got whisked off. It would have been—
H: Friday night, I think. First night of disturbances on and off the campus.
S: What day? What month?
H: That would have been May 2nd. ‘Cause May 4th was the shooting. They put us in some apartment building or dormitory or something. I don’t exactly remember. It seemed like it was off campus—I don’t exactly remember where it was now. And all I remember, it was dark by the time we got there, and it was the most bizarre experience because all night, there were helicopters flying over with their spotlights shining down. It was like you’re in some third world country or something, you know? I don’t think we got very much sleep. It might have been Saturday night, Sunday. I get the days mixed up, but what I do remember is that then, the next morning, they’d burned the Rossi building the night before. So then all the political people were going bananas. It was Rhodes’ decision to send us there in the first place. They put us in trucks, and we went to I think it was the men’s gymnasium, and we spent part of the night in the gymnasium—just kind of laying on the floor. This was only my company, and we were a Headquarters Company, so right off the bat, we would not have been on Blanket Hill or near the shootings because we were a Headquarters Company; we were supposed to be taking care of the headquarters. But I remember, suddenly that morning—the morning of the shootings—‘cause in the army, it’s always hurry up and wait. “Hurry up, get out here! Get out here!” And then you stand around for two or three hours. This was one of those times: “Hurry up, hurry up! Get outside, and circle around the gymnasium!” And that’s what we were doing—the people in my company. And we had live ammunition and blanks, both. This must have been a time at which things were really heating up on the hill because they told us to lock and load our ammunition. We were all standing in a circle next to each other. Suddenly I heard, “Pop, pop, pop. Pop, pop, pop,” which is what it sounds like from a distance. And I distinctly—just like it was yesterday—remember turning to my buddy next to me saying, “Oh, they're firing blanks.” Because no one that I knew ever, ever thought you would fire live ammunition in this situation. So that’s how I experienced Kent.
S: So you kind of heard it from a distance.
H: Heard it from a distance over the hill; didn’t see it. I heard it happening. But still very emotional, even though I didn’t really have anything to do with the shooting. The idea that I was there.
S: So you were around that gymnasium, just sort of guarding?
H: Yeah, we were protecting public property basically. And I think they probably felt, “Well they burnt down the ROTC building; the next thing they’ll do is burn down the men’s gymnasium.” After the shootings, they split us up and put us to guard different buildings. By that time, they kicked everybody else off campus. It’s an interesting experience for me because my wife was a student there at the same time I was in the Guard, so she can talk about it from her perspective, and I can talk about it from mine. We didn’t know each other of course; this was years before we even met. She talks about how they just basically said, “Get out! Leave everything. Take what few belongings you can get in a bag, and jump in a car and leave. Get off this campus as quickly as possible.” With no thought about when are we coming back? How are we going to deal with our education? Nothing was planned. She talks about her mother sitting on the steps of her house in Canton worried sick because, you know, she heard this all on the news but couldn’t communicate; there were no cell phones. There was no method of communicating back then like there is nowadays. But anyways, our task was supposed to be to guard the entrances to all these buildings – these campus buildings – and ask for identification before anyone could enter. And this man came up to me, and I said, “Who are you? Show me some identification.” It was the president of the university. “Oh, okay. Go right ahead.” Again, the whole thing was almost like dreamlike.
S: Well, that’s what I was kind of wondering. It’s like when you talked about being whisked in. There’s no way there could be a plan for this.
H: Nope.
S: You just were there.
H: I don’t think there was a plan, and I think that’s why the things that happen ultimately happen. The Guard wasn’t prepared for this kind of experience. You talk about being prepared. Well, how can you possibly be prepared for a situation like this? Even to this day, there’s controversy about how it happened, why it happened, who was responsible, who gave the command, was there a command, were the guard in fear of their lives? Despite all these books and everything else that have been written, a lot of it’s still an open question.
S: From your perspective having been one of the members, did you get any information from anybody—any of your fellow guardsmen or anybody there about what they had seen or known?
H: No, I never meant any of the people that were near the event and never met anybody that shot anyone or even fired their weapons. We were really separated physically and after the shootings, we lived in a dorm for a couple days, and we ate in the dorm cafeteria. That was another thing that was like, this is so bizarre. We’re not students, yet we’re using the student facilities, and the students are not here. So that’s what we did for the next couple days, and then finally, they sent us home. One thing I remember is politically, I must have had a pretty different political orientation from a lot of my peers because I recall that some of us weren’t on speaking terms for quite a while after that. And we only saw each other once a month, but there was a pretty conservative faction in the Guard, and then there were probably a few people like me who weren’t nearly as conservative, who to this day feel that it all could be laid at the feet of Governor Rhodes. He’s the one who made that decision, and again, that’s why we have the state patrol. That’s why we have police force. They're trained to deal with situations like this. We weren’t trained in any way, shape, or form to deal with this, and so this is the consequence, I think.
S: You mentioned your relationship between you and other guards’ members and some of your political differences. How about you and some of the people outside the Guard? Did they, first of all, know that you were in the Guard? And secondly—
H: Yeah, most of my friends kind of thought the way I did. I mean, we all thought that George McGovern was going to get elected president. That’s how politically isolated, I think, we were from reality. Because all the people I knew were going to vote for him that must mean that he’s going to win. I don’t know if I wasn’t reading the newspapers. There wasn’t any public radio or television. So I didn’t have any disagreements with my friends because we all kind of thought the same way, but in the Guard, yeah, there was a definite difference of opinion. A lot of students went home and just got earfuls from their parents about, “Damn students—they got what they deserved.” There was a lot of hate mail flying back and forth, but I didn’t personally experience any of that. I know about it because I read about it.
S: How did that change your perspective on things? You told us how and why you got in; this seems like something that would change your perspective.
H: Yeah, well of course, I couldn’t wait to get out. And that was only a year before I got out, so I was on the tail end of my active duty. I think it just solidified some of my political beliefs—my anti-war beliefs, even though I was not politically active, other than attending a few demonstrations and things like that, but not nearly as much as a lot of people were. It certainly—if my beliefs weren’t pretty solidified by that time that sort of helped them be. To this day, I'm pretty liberal. I don’t mind calling myself liberal; I don’t need to be a progressive or—by the way, I celebrated the exit from the Guard by having a gigantic party at which I auctioned off all my uniforms to the highest bidder. That was kind of my feelings toward the Guard. A lot of it was a big waste of time. For example, we would go to a summer camp, and every morning you’d go out and set up your guns—strategic position somewhere out in the forest. And for the next eight hours, the task was to hide basically. Just stay out of the way. Don’t bother me. I think that idea or lack of the use of that time in a constructive fashion came from the top down. Otherwise, I don’t think that we would have gotten away with it that much. I think it was sort of like out of sight, out of mind: You stay over there, and stay out of my way, and I won’t bother you. And then when the day was over, you’d all go out and drink all night. And then come back the next day and do the same thing for two weeks. And weekends were basically the same way; we didn’t do anything constructive for those two days. You’d just go find some place to hunker down, and then they’d call everybody to attention, do a little inspection, and everybody would go home. That was the National Guard back then; it’s not the National Guard nowadays, of course. I think that was pretty widespread.
S: Before we move from Kent State, I just want to ask if there is anything else that stands out in your mind or a memory that’s particularly salient or anything that you haven’t mentioned.
H: As far as the Guard’s concerned, I don’t think so. I grew up during that time. Eventually went back to school, finished my undergraduate degree, got a graduate degree, came to work here.
S: Well, yeah, I guess, let me ask you about that. So your next step was, you finished your undergraduate degree, and where was that?
H: Antioch. I sort of had a midlife crisis, I guess in my early forties. It took me a long time to finish my education, so Antioch was the perfect place for me because I was able to transfer a lot of credit. I developed a really great relationship with a young professor, a peer, and eventually colleague, but did a lot of independent study with him. So at that point of my life, it was perfect academic setting for me. By that time, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so I was very successful. As soon as I finished my undergraduate, I knew I wanted to go to Ball State and get my degree in historic preservation.
S: So your major area of concentration at Antioch was—?
H: History. Finished what I started at Akron U, but I knew, of course, you don’t go anywhere without a graduate degree, so if I wanted a job, I had to get more specific. I had an interesting experience at Antioch. It had to do with the Guard. I was in a creative writing course, and I’m like forty-four or something like that, and everybody else in the room was like twenty-two or twenty-three. Well Antioch has always from day one thought of itself as the liberal bastion of political thought. I think they almost had an inferiority complex; they thought that, “Why didn’t Kent occur here?” Because this is ground zero when it comes to liberal political thinking and anti-war and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, we had to write an article or a paper—a first-person experience. So I wrote one on my first-person experience at Kent. You had to stand up and read this, and the students just—they were absolutely amazed. First of all, they met somebody who had been at Kent, even though I had nothing to do directly with the shootings or anything, but there’s a somebody that had actually been to this place and had this experience. All kinds of questions. I guess I maybe hadn’t realized the impact that it had on a lot of other people, even people much younger than myself. This would have been in ’85, so this was fifteen years after. These kids would have been three or four years old at that time, or five or six. I don’t know. An entirely new generation. Thinking about this—for them, they hadn’t experienced that history, but they knew about it.
S: Just to bring this up today, what was your trajectory from your grad studies to where you are now?
H: Yeah, as soon as I graduated, there was really basically a job here for me, waiting for me. I had done survey and inventory, Stark property inventory for the office as a graduate student, two summers before I graduated from Ball State. So I knew there was going to be a job opening. I worked at the Montgomery County Historical Society for six months after I graduated from Ball State in July until this job became available in April of 1988, so that’s when I started, and I quit four weeks ago.
S: And just to clarify, you were doing what specifically here?
H: I was in charge of the certified local government program, which is a program where we work with local communities to establish historic preservation programs and help them create local ordinances and architectural design review. The goal, of course, is to revitalize downtown, save neighborhoods, save old buildings. Now, I did a number of special projects over the years. Like I said, I worked on all kinds of things related to the National Road, obtained funding for the first inventory of the Road, worked to get the Road designated on state scenic byway and ultimately a national scenic byway, cofounded the National Road Alliance—which is a six state organization oversees protection of the road—founding member of the Ohio National Road Alliance, so the office gave me that flexibility and opportunity to do those things, so I'm really grateful that that was a possibility. Then I also, I was in charge of the state plan, so we had to do that every three or four years. A lot of other projects—I was a go-to barn guy; every time someone had a question about—I was sort of the jack of all trades for the office. It’s the only job of its kind. Everybody else has a much more specific responsibility related to National Historic Preservation Act. They do 106 reviews, or they do historic tax credit reviews. That’s usually where most of the work is done. My job is much broader than that—a lot of independent work. I had a job description, but if an opportunity came along, and it related to historic preservation, chances are, I could probably pursue that if I wanted to—as long as I took care of all these specific responsibilities that I had. And I really valued that. I think I was pretty lucky to be in that position, and I had a boss that gave me that kind of flexibility and didn’t feel the need to stand over me but, he knew that I could be trusted to get the work done.
S: And now you’re doing part-time?
H: Yeah, I've always taught part-time ever since I graduated from Ball State. When I first started here, we had a system of field offices. By that time, there were only five. At one time, there were seventeen field offices around the state back in housing on days at federal funding in the early ‘80s. So I went to work at Bowling Green ‘cause we had a field office there. That was where the job become open, and I worked there for four years, and then the person who was at Wright State retired, and so I jumped at the chance to come to Wright State because I was living in Dayton and commuting from Dayton to Bowling Green every Monday and every Friday for four years. So that got old. The opportunity to come to Wright State and be five minutes from home; It didn’t take me long to make that decision. But then the field offices all closed - budget crunch time about 1990, I think, ’91. Not ’91, I'm sorry—’98, ’99. So for the last ten years, I've worked here in the Columbus office. But I commuted back and forth from Springboro.
S: So the courses that you're teaching relates in some way—?
H: Yeah, I teach Architectural History and Historic Preservation alternating spring quarters, and then I teach a course called Documenting the Building Environment, which is just a one credit hour Saturday course every February. And I was scheduled to teach a brand new course this fall called Interpreting Historic Sites, which I’d created—designed—until I discovered that when you’re retired under two different retirement systems, as I did, and when you go back to work under the lesser system—which is my case would be STRS—you can’t work for two months. So I had to cancel my course. I can’t go back to work till October 1st, and the course started today as a matter of fact would have been my first class. So anyway, that’s where that’s at. So I continue to teach, and I’ll be doing some consulting work.
S: I just want to kind of close this out. Obviously you’re a student of history and preservation and so on. From your days when you were in National Guard— did you keep any diaries, journals, pictures, any of that sort of thing, or is it just sort of up here?
H: I wish I had like of people. No, I wasn’t a diary person. I look back on earlier in my life and wish I had made some notes and written things down. At this point of my life where the past seems to be more and more to me. Maybe that’s what happens when you get older. I don’t know. So I think more about it. But I didn’t—like a lot of people—didn’t think in those terms when all this was happening, or when earlier experiences were happening. I have a photograph of me with a hard hat with a military pot on my head in the National Guard. That’s the only thing—that and the group picture that they always took of your company. That’s the only visual evidence—that and my honorable discharge.
S: You said something about this—how your time in the Guard affected your personal or professional life. You said you sort of grew up, but is there anything you wanted to add about that?
H: Not really, it was just something you did. Like I said, I didn’t have any strong political beliefs. I think I just wanted to be left alone, you know, but I couldn’t be left alone. I had to do something, or something was going to be done to me. At some point in your life, you just try to take control of things. My way of taking control in this situation was to join the National Guard. It wasn’t because I liked the Guard or hated the Guard or I believed the Guard was important. It was just there. It was a convenience factor for me, and that’s all it was. And I kind of treated it that way for six years. It was like, you ignored as much as you can. You do what you have to do. That’s what everybody was doing I think at that point. So you pick that up right away. Don’t make waves; don’t bother me. Just stay out of the way. The idea that you can go supposedly learning how to fire your weapon but you could fill out a scorecard with a pencil, to me, is indicative of where the Guard was at that point. I'm sure it’s very, very different nowadays, but that’s the way things were back then.
S: Well just to sort of wrap things up, is there anything else that we’ve left out or you wanted to add or sticks out in your mind?
H: I don’t think so. It’s been worth recalling some of these things.
S: Thanks very much. I really appreciate you getting here.